• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Breaking News: Benazir Bhutto killed in suicide attack.

Status
Not open for further replies.
G

GSG Flash

Nobody ruins my family vacation but me...and maybe the boy!
RumFore said:
Surprised no one has blamed Bush yet. Pakistan more than any country scares the shit out of me. They have Nukes and you don't really know who the hell is in charge and now this.
Click to expand...

Pakistan's nukes are firmly in the military's control and AFAIK the military is fairly stable and is in no danger of losing the nukes.
 
C

Culex

Banned
GSG Flash said:
Pakistan's nukes are firmly in the military's control and AFAIK the military is fairly stable and is in no danger of losing the nukes.
Click to expand...

Ever since the Islamic party took power in Pakistan, Musharraf has had to bend to them, including making the military much more religious than ever in the past. I'd be really worried if I were you.
 
G

GSG Flash

Nobody ruins my family vacation but me...and maybe the boy!
Culex said:
Ever since the Islamic party took power in Pakistan, Musharraf has had to bend to them, including making the military much more religious than ever in the past. I'd be really worried if I were you.
Click to expand...

What exactly is this "Islamic party" you speak of? Last I recalled, PML (musharraf'sparty) wasn't really a hardcore Islamic party.
 
C

Culex

Banned
GSG Flash said:
What exactly is this "Islamic party" you speak of? Last I recalled, PML (musharraf'sparty) wasn't really a hardcore Islamic party.
Click to expand...

His party isn't per se, however the religous majority of the rest of the country, including officials in the parliament, are hard-line muslims, of which Musharraf has been dealing with for the past 6+ years. You should research his seizing power and uneasy relationships with muslim leaders in Pakistan, really interesting stuff.
 
G

GSG Flash

Nobody ruins my family vacation but me...and maybe the boy!
Culex said:
His party isn't per se, however the religous majority of the rest of the country, including officials in the parliament, are hard-line muslims, of which Musharraf has been dealing with for the past 6+ years.
Click to expand...

Still though, I would be more worried about some rogue nuclear scientists giving the Taliban or Al Qaeda information on how to obtain nukes and technology for nukes rather than them somehow getting their hands on Pakistan's missiles.
 
C

Culex

Banned
GSG Flash said:
Still though, I would be more worried about some rogue nuclear scientists giving the Taliban or Al Qaeda information on how to obtain nukes and technology for nukes rather than them somehow getting their hands on Pakistan's missiles.
Click to expand...

..and you should be. There's a good reason why we (the US) have pumped over 10 billion in foreign aid to Pakistan since his rise to power. He's basically holding the country together, for better or for worse. For our sake, we better hope that there aren't any Pakistani nukes hidden near Wazirestan at military bases we don't know about.
 
F

FightyF

Banned
scorcho said:
build up the state institutions first. placate tribal leaders by building local institutions around them with the understanding that final dominion rests with the central government. don't rush to democratize the government too quickly as it has all too often been victim to corruption and weakening its central authority/legitimacy. authoritarianism could be considered in the short-term to legitimize rule of law and for the state to have a monopoly of violence over the country.
Click to expand...

Despite the near authoritarian law that exists at the moment, these tribal leaders have gone untouched because they put up fights resulting in military losses.

People in the West have blamed Pakistan for not doing enough along its borders, but don't realize the difficult situation it poses. They could fight these tribal leaders and incur losses, or they could be lazy and bomb them but that would cause an uproar among the Pakistani populace.

Despite military rule, there is no monopoly of violence and I don't think that will ever change.

Dr.Guru of Peru said:
The guy who did this is a real piece of shit. To kill Bhutto is one thing, but to then blow yourself up after you've shot her and take 15 other lives? What was the point?
Click to expand...

I don't know if it's the same person, but either way, it could probably done so that aid could not come in a timely manner and perhaps save her life in case the shot was bad. That's my guess anyways. The attack shows some sort of planning and since the last attack killed over 100 but not Bhutto, they probably wanted to make sure she was dead.

Y2Kev said:
So most likely she was in cahoots with Musharraf anyway?
Click to expand...

It looked like there was some sort of shared power deal that was in the works, but IIRC they fell apart, and she still got her amnesty.


I'm rather disappointed Bhutto didn't take further security precautions, as while by no means am I suggesting it's her fault for getting killed, I'm not sure why she opted to stand out of an armored car to wave to her supporters, particularly in light of recent history. I suspect she could've likely won a significant part of the vote in January, even had she stayed out of the public and with tight security, given the discontent with Musharaff at the moment.
Click to expand...

She did ask for more protection shortly after the first attack, and she did get it in the form of security forces (in the hundreds), but nothing high tech (which she also asked for). This attack was apparently low tech, meaning that some of the stuff she asked for wouldn't have helped.
 
D

Dr.Guru of Peru

played the long game
Culex said:
Ever since the Islamic party took power in Pakistan, Musharraf has had to bend to them, including making the military much more religious than ever in the past. I'd be really worried if I were you.
Click to expand...

The MMA is not in power in Pakistan.
 
S

Spire

Subconscious Brolonging
FightyF said:
Benazir Bhutto is a woman.
Click to expand...

I'm well aware of that, I'm also aware I misspelled her name. I was mocking mainstream America, namely people like the twits in my break room today who didn't think the story was important at all because Bhutto was the "former" PM.
 
F

FightyF

Banned
Spire said:
I'm well aware of that, I'm also aware I misspelled her name. I was mocking mainstream America, namely people like the twits in my break room today who didn't think the story was important at all because Bhutto was the "former" PM.
Click to expand...

:lol Oh ok, sorry. I thought you were attempting to make a joke without knowing anything about the topic at hand.

Anyways, I've been talking to other Pakistanis about this and it's really hard to say which way this whole situation will go. It could lead to civil war, it could lead to a power struggle within the People's Party, it could just mean delayed elections. I suppose finding out who is responsible will dictate what occurs next.
 
V

v1cious

Banned
i expect a video of the assassination to surface soon. you know someone had to taping at the time.

anyways, the shit's ridiculous. they already made an attempt on her life once, so why the hell was she out there parading around in public? what is the significance of this whole thing anyway (aside from the fact that she was the first woman leader)? i mean there seems to be this huge political firestorm going on, but i'm just not seeing how this effects anyone that doesn't live in the middle east.
 
B

bill0527

Member
Culex said:
Ever since the Islamic party took power in Pakistan, Musharraf has had to bend to them, including making the military much more religious than ever in the past. I'd be really worried if I were you.
Click to expand...

Some accounts I've read and heard say that both the military and Pakistan's secret police have been infiltrated by Jihadists and fundamental Islamics. Musharraf has done virtually nothing to root them out because he's trying to walk a fine line between them. But he's going to have to get rid of them or he's next.
 
ToyMachine228

ToyMachine228

Member
This is just crazy. We could be looking at another hardcore sectionalist war. Hell, World War II was started over an assassination. It's really crazy to think of just how much different societies around the world are. As an American it really makes me think outside the box to see situations like this.
 
E

effzee

Member
watching the news today i love the "hero" and "democracy" spin/angle they put on her.

ALL Pakistani politics (like pretty much elsewhere) is corrupted to high hell but its just more violent. a lot more violent.

these same media outlets not running shit about Pakistan and the history of all...Sharif, Bhutto, and Mushsaraf are now acting like experts on Pakistani politics and running 24/7 coverage. its really pathetic how Bhutto is important all of a sudden now that she is dead. till she decided to come back was anyone in the US govt even supporting her or clamoring for her to come back?

and Stealth Fox you are right...we are jaded. the attack in OCT was far worse in the terms of lives lost for no season.

im no fan of Bhutto so maybe I am even more jaded but of course no one wanted to see her die. at the same time this was expected. if Musharaf were to die tomorrow i would not be shocked one bit.

also i love how ppl who know next to nothing wanted old corrupt regimes back in pakistan solely because they were democratically elected. and i use that democratically loosely since so much corruption is prevalent during elections that you have no real idea.

how does that make sense? PAKISTAN NEEDS DEMOCRACY...QUICK CALL THE OLD EXILED CORRUPT LEADERS BACK INTO POWER!
 
Y

yoopoo

Banned
Al-Qaeda claims death.

Karachi, 27 Dec. (AKI) - (by Syed Saleem Shahzad) - A spokesperson for the al-Qaeda terrorist network has claimed responsibility for the death on Thursday of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen,” Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English. Al-Yazid is the main al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.
Click to expand...
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.1710322437
 
1

140.85

Cognitive Dissonance, Distilled
Some excellent perspective from McCarthy over at NRO. (skip it if you're a Paul pod or blame-America-first nutter)

Benazir Bhutto: Killed by the real Pakistan

A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.

Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.

President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.

In Pakistan, it is the regime that propounds Western values, such as last year’s reform of oppressive, Sharia-based Hudood laws, which made rape virtually impossible to prosecute — a reform enacted despite furious fundamentalist rioting that was, shall we say, less well covered in the Western press. The regime, unreliable and at times infuriating, is our only friend. It is the only segment of Pakistani society capable of confronting militant Islam — though its vigor for doing so is too often sapped by its own share of jihadist sympathizers.

Yet, we’ve spent two months pining about its suppression of democracy — its instinct not further to empower the millions who hate us.

For the United States, the question is whether we learn nothing from repeated, inescapable lessons that placing democratization at the top of our foreign policy priorities is high-order folly.

The transformation from Islamic society to true democracy is a long-term project. It would take decades if it can happen at all. Meanwhile, our obsessive insistence on popular referenda is naturally strengthening — and legitimizing — the people who are popular: the jihadists. Popular elections have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither will they reform a place where Osama bin Laden wins popular opinion polls and where the would-be reformers are bombed and shot at until they die.

We don’t have the political will to fight the war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans. And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have the resources to do it.

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

— Andrew C. McCarthy directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Click to expand...
 
W

whytemyke

Honorary Canadian.
140.85 said:
Some excellent perspective from McCarthy over at NRO. (skip it if you're a Paul pod or blame-America-first nutter)

Benazir Bhutto: Killed by the real Pakistan
Click to expand...
that article would hold a lot more weight if it actually paid attention to reality. she was more popular with fundamentalists than Musharraf is.

taking that into account, the article kind of shifts into the whole "let's throw together a bunch of half-truths so we can bash brown people" party that most self-righteous westerners love so much.

the fact of the matter is that pakistan is nothing to scoff at. their military was key in multiple military actions we've been involved with (Somalia, for one) and they were having elections before we even knew who Osama bin Laden was, all while they were trying to keep India from pushing them out of Kashmir and the Taliban from flowing into their borders like cancer and infecting the government.

I mean let's call a spade a spade here. If our problem was really with the Pakistani people as a whole then Musharraf would be dead and we'd have had suitcase nukes going off in American cities 4 years ago. The country is by no means some panacea to Western-Islamic tensions, but it's also not the grinning villain that so many ethnocentric chickenhawks make them out to be.
 
D

Dr.Guru of Peru

played the long game
140.85 said:
Some excellent perspective from McCarthy over at NRO. (skip it if you're a Paul pod or blame-America-first nutter)

Benazir Bhutto: Killed by the real Pakistan
Click to expand...

If Pakistan is a nation comprised mainly of jihadists, and the only way to bring about democracy and peace in a nation is to kill all the jihadists, then does this mean that all Pakistanis must be killed?

Anyways, I'm not sure where the "excellent perspective" is contained within that article. However, I sincerely doubt that Mr. McCarthy has the knowledge to provide us with any insight into the state of affairs in Pakistan. For example, while I am sure it was very convenient for him to cite that CNN poll number in an attempt to vilify the Pakistani population, he neglected to mention that many (IIRC, most) Pakistanis do not believe Osama Bin Laden was behind the attacks of September 11. Outrageous, still? Maybe, but it hardly paints the picture of a violent and bloodlusting populace as McCarthy attempts. Rather, an ignorant one.

As for his claim that the western media has played up the the lawyers, activists, judges, etc. protests while downplaying the Islamic fundamentalism, I have to ask: Is he living in some sort of fantasy world? That is the exact opposite of what I have observed.
 
B

Bezz

Banned
I heard someone say she was a corrupted politician...is that true?


Because if that is true the plot thickens
 
M

Macam

Banned
v1cious said:
i expect a video of the assassination to surface soon. you know someone had to taping at the time.

anyways, the shit's ridiculous. they already made an attempt on her life once, so why the hell was she out there parading around in public? what is the significance of this whole thing anyway (aside from the fact that she was the first woman leader)? i mean there seems to be this huge political firestorm going on, but i'm just not seeing how this effects anyone that doesn't live in the middle east.
Click to expand...

Then perhaps you should click just about any of the 6 million articles that are currently floating around about the incident and actually read them.
 
Y

Yixian

Banned
v1cious said:
i expect a video of the assassination to surface soon. you know someone had to taping at the time.

anyways, the shit's ridiculous. they already made an attempt on her life once, so why the hell was she out there parading around in public? what is the significance of this whole thing anyway (aside from the fact that she was the first woman leader)? i mean there seems to be this huge political firestorm going on, but i'm just not seeing how this effects anyone that doesn't live in the middle east.
Click to expand...

Pakistan isn't in the middle east..
 
A

Azih

Member
he only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman
Click to expand...
Yes that's how she won elections twice... this guy is a moron and has no understanding of Pakistani demographics.
 
B

bionic77

Member
manipulate said:
that article is offensively fear-mongering claptrap, fuck
Click to expand...
I am so sick and tired of the way the right is trying to make everyone afraid all the time.

Not surprising that Bhutto was murdered, but not surprising either considering they tried to kill her two months ago and also the fact that there were two assassination attempts on Musharraf.

Just hope for that country that the riots that follow are not too bad.
 
V

VanMardigan

has calmed down a bit.
So now they're saying she didn't die from the shots (or that she wasn't even hit by the bullets). It was shrapnel from the bomb that killed her.
 
jobber

jobber

Would let Tony Parker sleep with his wife
:eek: :eek: :eek: @ the video of her in the car then the explosion


she didn't get shot
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

  • Locked
Taliban vs ISIS K continues suicide bomber kills 50 in suspected ISIS attack on Afghanistan mosque as the country descends further into chaos
1
781
chromhound replied
These bugs come out at nighttime, and attacking victims, they silently kill or leave them with a lifelong infection
33
3K
Happosai replied
5 killed after blasts hit bus terminal in Jakarta, Indonesia
23
4K
GKB replied
Terrorist attack in London [up: 6 people killed, ~50 injured, 3 attackers dead]
52 53 54 55 56
3K
473K
BrassDragon replied
  • Locked
In Pakistan, Taliban's attack on Easter targets Christians; 67 people killed
1
1K
Kurdel replied
Top Bottom